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FABBS Honors Keith Holyoak

May 23, 2019

Keith Holyoak’s career in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience has been devoted to understanding the representation of knowledge in the human mind and brain. Over the past four decades, working with an evolving network of exceptional students and collaborators, he has made important contributions to our understanding of how people think and reason. The central focus of his work has been on how people learn and use abstract relationships that depend on more than direct similarity—relations of the sort required to grasp social regulations, moral concerns, causality, metaphors, and analogies. In all these areas, Holyoak has aimed to understand the cognitive skills that endow humans with what the philosopher Charles Peirce called “special aptitudes for guessing right.”